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If you're researching recipes, cooking dishes that you can't cook from memory, seeking out particular ingredients that aren't the same 20 things you always buy and won't have a purpose in your cupboard if you deviate from your intended meal plan, etc., you've already specced several points into amateur chef.
Sure, cooking TV shows and YouTubers are successful, so there are a lot of people specced into amateur chef, but I don't think the typical person is. The average person flits between packaged breakfast foods, has a small repertoire of sandwiches or buys prepared meals at lunchtime, and rotates through a few different frozen dinners and takeout/delivery restaurants.
But I think you're right that even so the modern diet is way tastier than what was around 50 years ago.
The size of the average vegetable has become bigger and its cost has gone down, but the taste of the average vegetable has become much worse. If you can make food barely taste like anything (so it doesn't really feel like you're eating anything at all), you now have to fix that problem with stuff that's a lot more calorically dense and/or load the dish up with salt.
Also, 50 years ago, with respect to dinner the average person would have been either cooking it themselves or married to someone who was. Fast food was a lot more expensive, relatively speaking.
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I agree that the modern diet is tastier than it was in the fifties, but how much of the fattening is just ‘there’s tons of sugar in everything, even things which don’t seem like they should have sugar, so unless you’re at bake-your-own bread levels of from scratch you take in way more calories than it seems like your meal should have’. Add in that, as you note, fewer people bake their own bread.
The point was not necessarily tastiness as an abstract category but the variety in the diet. One can now easily sample cuisines in the world at the confines of one's home and even a small town (~50,000 people) will have a variety of ethnic restaurants.
The UN's official definition of "town" (roughly aligning with the common understanding of the word) extends from 10,000 people to 49,999 people. A municipality with "∼50,000 people" is either a large town or a small city, not a small town.
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Bread, literally, has just as many calories per ounce if you add sugar or don't. The infamous Wonder Bread has 5g of sugar to 29g of total carbohydrate for a 57g serving.
‘Bake-your-own-bread’ was a descriptor, not a literal designation, to refer to cooking tasks on that level of from-scratch preparedness. Making your own tomato sauce/baked beans might be a better descriptor from a literally mechanistic perspective than baking your own bread but it seems like homemade bread is more recognizable as symbolic of an almost entirely from scratch household kitchen. It’s certainly slightly more concise.
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